Chip Heads Gauge Silicon Roadmap

AMD, ARM, Intel review Moore's law and more

Rick Merritt, EETimes 2/1/2018 04:01 PM EST

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Whether Moore’s law is dead or alive, the semiconductor roadmap leads to both big challenges and opportunities, according to a panel of technologists from AMD, ARM, and Intel at the DesignCon event here.

Speakers were split over whether the number of transistors on a chip is continuing to double every two years as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed in 1965. “There’s at least a slowing of node transitions,” said Rob Aitken, a fellow and director of technology at ARM, noting both a three-year span between 16-nm and 10-nm production and the power advantages of “Denard scaling stopped at 90 nm for the kinds of circuits we deal with.”

Intel’s research provides a “five-year process horizon so our internal roadmap is to 5 nm, and we don’t see [Moore’s law] ending in that time,” said Rory McInerney, vice president of Intel’s platform engineering group and director of its server development group.